Real-Time Prototyping of Audio Algorithms Using MATLAB and Simulink

Arvind Ananthan, MathWorks

Personal computers are increasingly being used as the primary development environment for creating, designing and simulating audio algorithms and complete audio systems with live inputs from multi-channel audio sound cards.

In this webinar, we show how audio algorithms can be designed and simulated live in MATLAB and Simulink. Since MATLAB is a very popular tool of choice for creating many signal processing algorithms, we’ll show how Embedded MATLAB can be used to convert MATLAB code into C-code and used within a graphical development environment, Simulink, which reduces the time to create test-benches for these algorithms. These Simulink models also interface with typical multi-channel sound cards through PortAudio which enables communication with standard audio drivers such as Direct Sound, WDKMS and ASIO.

The presentation also touches upon typical challenges engineers face when working with live multi-channel audio algorithm simulation, namely, channel synchronization, dropped frames, and latency issues. Finally, we show how an algorithm developed using this approach can be implemented on a real-time processor such as the Dm6437 DSP from TI for real-time deployment and parameter tuning. A 3-band parametric equalizer is used as an example to showcase many of these concepts during this presentation.